Rights, Commons, and Citizenship: Framing Urban Scholarship and Action

The struggle to broaden and democratize access to urban space is one of the defining political struggles of our time. Around the world, excluded and marginalized urban residents often mobilize to collectively claim access to the spaces and material resources of the city. Scholars who share a commitment to urban social justice and inclusion have analyzed – and at times, encouraged and championed – such mobilizations using three distinct but related conceptual frameworks: the right to the city (RTTC), the urban commons, and urban citizenship.

This call for papers is for a special issue of Urban Studies that focuses on the intersections, overlaps, and distinctions among these three highly used (and sometimes abused) conceptual frameworks. It is motivated by two main objectives. First, by juxtaposing urban commons, urban citizenship and RTTC, we hope to stimulate clear comparative thinking about the definition and scholarly application of these conceptual frameworks. Second, and relatedly, we aim to provide a venue for case-based research that advances our understanding of how (and with what consequences) these frameworks are adapted and deployed in the real world of urban politics.

The RTTC, urban citizenship, and urban commons have distinct intellectual histories. The right to the city, a term first coined by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book, Le Droit à la Ville, emphasizes the right of residents to shape and govern their city for the purposes of “use value.” Urban commons is an extension of the pioneering work of Elinor Ostrom, which explored the bottom-up emergence of self-governance over common pool resources, and is most often used today to draw attention to the potential for collective self-management of urban resources. And though the very etymology of citizenship suggests that the notion of urban citizenship can be traced back at least to early modernity, it has more recently been used to draw attention to cities as an important site for citizenship claims, especially in contexts where local governments stand as a bulwark against illiberalism at broader state scales.

Despite their distinct genealogies, the three frameworks share a basic commonality, beyond their obvious focus on the urban context: They are normative constructs, developed to ground and justify claims for the decommodification and radical democratization of urban space and resources. Perhaps because of this shared normative orientation, the three terms have at times been used interchangeably, and the distinctions among them are not always clear. For instance, the urban commons literature emerged as part of a broader reinterpretation of Ostrom’s pioneering work on common pool resource governance that redefined the “commons” in increasingly broad terms – “knowledge commons,” “social commons,” “intellectual and cultural commons,” –  and as a verb (“commoning”) that suggested the move from private to collective ownership as a moral imperative, which also constitutes the foundation of RTTC claims. Similarly, because the notion of RTTC at least hints at a legal claim to “rights,” it has a close kinship to the notion of urban citizenship.

To develop the scholarly and real-world power of these frameworks, we need to disentangle them from each other – to delineate their respective boundaries and clarify their key premises. In what ways are their normative arguments similar and different? Do these frameworks support similar or different kinds of claims to urban space in terms of who makes the claims, what the claims concern, and how they are made? What role (if any) does the state play in each framework? What is the potential, and what are the limitations, of each framework as a political tool for real-world mobilization? Conceptual clarity is no less important for normative frameworks than it is for concepts used in descriptive and explanatory social science. Accordingly, this call for papers seeks contributions that bring these frameworks into dialogue with each other, as well as with real-world urban political practice, in order to illuminate their commonalities and differences, their strengths and weaknesses, and their usefulness for various purposes. Contributions from across disciplines are welcome, as are papers that draw on any and all urban settings in the Global South and North.

We invite proposals that align with the purposes of the call in various ways, including but not limited to the following topics and themes: